Were the crusades justified? Why or why not?..... speak your mind.
As usual, I'm jumping the gun and not reading the rest of the thread, but I have just one question:
What crusades are you talking about???? I think you should really think twice before you toss around a word like "crusade" because people will think you mean what Wikipedia describes as "The
Crusades were a series of
religiously-sanctioned military campaigns waged by much of Latin
Christian Europe, particularly the
Franks of
France and the
Holy Roman Empire." The Crusades are a terrible stain on the reputation of the Roman Church. If I remember correctly from first year university history, crusaders were told by the pope (since this was basically an extermination of political enemies of the pope) that people who they killed in the crusades wouldn't count as sin and that they could do this to get time off their Purgatory or something. I'm not great at history so if I get any of my facts straight, feel free to correct me. But obviously, no Christian could possibly think Jesus would be ok with us slaughtering our political enemies. It's like saying "Was the holocaust justified?" And hearing in response: "How can you possibly think that the slaughter of 6 million Jews plus countless other minority groups be justfied??????" and then saying "No, not THE Holocaust, as in the one that happened under Nazi rule during World War II, I mean a different holocaust."
But let me tell what I learned about The Crusades. When I was at the Urbana mission conference at the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaine in 2000, we saw an animation about Christianity since Jesus, basically it started in Isreal, and then expanded from there, mostly northward, but all over. Then after that the Christians in the Middle East dissapeared and for a long time Christianity was centred in Europe. What happened to the Christians in the Middle East? They were slaughtered in the Crusades!!!! Now, I'm not sure if the Crusaders knew they were slaughtering brothers in Christ along with the Muslims or if it was intentional because they weren't Roman Christians and therefore no friend of theirs, I've heard both so if anyone knows, please let me know.
I was thinking the other day about how different the world would be if the Crusades never happened. There'd probably be a lot more Christians in the Middle East, that's for sure, and Christian/Islamic relations would be a lot warmer. See, I saw a cover of a magazine once that said "The future belongs to Islam." I think that's an overstatement, but one of the big reasons is that Muslims are free to seek converts in countries where Christians are the largest religion, but Christian missionaries aren't welcome in Islamic countries. You know, I saw Muslim men handing out pro-Muslim literature in one of the most croweded intersections in the biggest city in Canada. I toyed with the idea of asking them if they had any advice for me if I wanted to hand out Bibles in a major city of Saudi Arabia. I wonder what they'd say. Now, I wouldn't mean to imply that they should keep their religion in their country and leave ours alone. I like that Canadians have freedom of religion and people are able to preach on the street corner without persecution. However, if they were honest with me they'd probably tell me that I wouldn't have the freedom to walk around with my blazing red hair showing, let alone preach the Gospel. But that would beg the question: why isn't there much freedom in Islamic countries and what does that say about Islam? I mean, yeah, Europe medelled in their buisness and that didn't help, but they also medeled in a lot of other countries that enjoy more freedom today than Islamic countries. Have you seen the movie Presepolis? It's a great movie, check it out. But basically, it's about a little girl in Iran in the 1970s when Iran was ruled by the Shaw. The original Shaw was a British puppet. He (or maybe it was his son) tried to modernize Iran but things weren't great, so they overthrew him and had an Islamic revolution, and things where more oppressive than ever.
So, ironically, in the long run (the very long run) the Crusades were good for Islam, because it got rid of most of the Christians in the Middle East and probably solidified their opionions of Christians as bad guys that remains 1000 years later.